To solve wildfire crisis, let the myth of ‘the wild’ die

“On this site President Theodore Roosevelt sat beside a campfire with John Muir on May 17, 1903,” readsa wooden marker, not far from Bridalveil Fall in Yosemite Valley.

- By Noau HaGGERTY

FRANCINE ORR Los Angeles Times
BRIDALVEIL FALL inside Yosemite National Park.

I stumbled across it last November, alongside other bundled-up tourists snapping photos of the all-caps lettering that sanctify the moment the founder of the Sierra Club inspired the president to protect Yosemite National Park. But to me, the sign tells a darker story.

Muir sold the president on a uniquely American myth of the wilderness — that if we work hard enough to isolate our beautiful public lands from our influence, we can preserve a landscape essentially “untouched” by man.

According to virtually all of the ecologists, fire scientists and Indigenous fire practitioners I have spoken with over the last year, this myth created our growing wildfire crisis in California.

To solve the crisis, they told me, the myth must die.

The days before my trip to Yosemite, I explored Stanislaus National Forest and nearby private timberlands.

I saw a whole lotta forest ready to burst into searing flames and a whole lotta forest that already had. But, I also saw the modest footprints of prescribed burns and forest thinning work, a small part of the state's sweeping attempt to correct the destruction this ideal ultimately caused.

Millennia ago, the mountainous forests and coastal chaparral of current-day California looked quite different.

The state’s conifer forests awaited low-intensity fires to roll across the ground every five to 20 years. Fire would clear out the understory — the vegetation underneath the tree canopy — releasing soil nutrients trapped in dead plants and letting sunlight reach a wide range of ground-dwelling plants.

Some conifer species, like the giant sequoia, rely on the heat of fire to crack open their closed cones and release their seeds; postfire is opportune time to grow, with a newly open and fertile landscape.